In the first of our classes on the Spanish you already know we explained how a great number of Spanish and English words share the same Latin roots.
In this second class we’ll stop waffling on about the debt we owe to those skirt-wearing, straight-road-building Ancient Roman types. We’ll just get right down to business with another set of word families which should look really familiar to you.
The suffix ‘mente’ is found in adverbs, the words we use for describing how an action is done. Notice how many of these Spanish adverbs share the same root as their English equivalents:
As you can see, the ‘Mente’ words often correspond to English ‘LY’ words.
You might have problems pronouncing these adverbs at first as they seem to have an incredible number of syllables. Don’t worry, you’ll soon get it!
Here are some example phrases which use the adverbs we’ve just learnt:
Once again we have Latin to thank for the similarities between these adjectives and many (not all) of their English counterparts.
Remember that the ending of the adjective must change to match the gender of the noun it describes: for feminine nouns the adjective ends in ‘a’, and for masculine nouns the ending is ‘o’.
*The adverb ‘verdaderamente’ literally means ‘truly’ (verdad = true)
Want to learn more Spanish adjectives, then have a quick look at our article on the most common Spanish adjectives.
In the first article in this series we looked at the similarity between English nouns which end in ‘TION’ and Spanish nouns ending in ‘CIÓN’. This included such incredibly common words as ‘nación‘ and ‘estación‘. We also covered the related adjectives, like ‘nacional‘, ‘internacional‘ and ‘emocional‘.
Next week, in part 3, we’ll look at the English words which are used in Spanish! Sign up to our newsletter (form in the footer) to be notified whenever we publish new classes, videos and courses.
The Spanish you know 3 
